Some of us didn’t run or fight—we smiled.

There’s a particular kind of tired that comes from trying to be good all the time.

It’s the exhaustion that comes from tolerating discomfort with a smile in order to stay safe.

We learn to read moods like weather patterns. We get good at keeping the peace, saying the right thing, softening the edges of our voice—even when we’re hurting. Especially then.

For some of us, it wasn’t a personality trait. It was survival.

We’ve all heard of fight, flight, and freeze. But there’s a quieter one—harder to spot from the outside.

It’s the nervous system choosing appeasement. It’s called the fawn response.

Fawning is the instinct to please, pacify, and disappear into someone else’s needs in order to stay safe. It’s tolerating discomfort with a smile. It’s saying “yes” when something inside says “no.” It’s offering care when what we really need is to be cared for.

It often starts in childhood, but we don’t always recognize it until much later—when the fatigue sets in. When the resentment builds. When we realize we’ve made ourselves likable at the cost of being fully known.

It can look like kindness. But it doesn’t feel kind on the inside.

It feels like a tightening in the chest. A quick smile we didn’t mean. A weight in the gut after a conversation that went “fine.”

It feels like being tired in our bones after holding the emotional weight of every room we walk into.

And still, we keep showing up. With softness. With laughter. With an offer to help.

Because for a long time, that was how we kept ourselves safe.

That was how we avoided being yelled at, left out, punished, or hurt. That was how we stayed close to the people we needed—even if it meant disappearing from ourselves.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about naming.

Fawning is a response wired into the body. It’s not a choice in the moment, it’s what our system learned to do before we even had words for it. And that means healing doesn’t start with shame or “fixing”—it starts with noticing.

Noticing when the smile comes too quickly. When the yes feels hollow. When our nervous system bristles even as our voice sounds sweet.

There’s no tidy ending here. No triumphant cure.

But there is something sacred in the pause. In the moment we catch ourselves mid-pleasing and ask, “What would honesty feel like right now?”

We may still feel the pull to say yes. To soften. To smile. To disappear in just the right way.

But healing the fawn response begins when we start hearing something else:

A quiet “no.”
A soft “not for me.”
A flicker of disgust—not bitterness, but wisdom.

Sometimes it’s a pullback in the stomach that has spent years forcing itself into openness. A gut that finally says: enough.

Not every smile was honest. Not every yes was consent. Some of us survived by abandoning ourselves—and now, the self is coming home.

Disgust might just be the medicine for compulsive people-pleasing. The sacred boundary. The inner animal waking up and remembering its shape.

This is how we heal.

Not by making ourselves more likable. But by becoming more honest. By letting the body speak what the mouth was too afraid to say.

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